Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  “You’re just jealous because I have a gallery show coming up and you’re out of work—again.”

  “Stop arguing and help me find Hazel!” Lucille said. “If she gets out on the road, she’ll be killed.”

  Jake hadn’t heard a single car go by the whole time he’d been here. Whoever Hazel was, she didn’t seem likely to get run down the minute she set foot on the road.

  In a matter of moments, Jake found himself alone on the porch with his grandfather, the old man with the mustache, and the dog. The others had gone off in different directions, Lucille and Archie yelling for Hazel, the others yelling for Destiny.

  When the voices faded away, it was quiet on the porch, except for the snoring of the dog. The old man stuck out his hand toward Jake. “Zedediah Applewhite, patriarch of the Applewhite clan,” he said. “How do you do?”

  Jake looked at the wrinkled, spotted, knobbly old hand. He was not about to shake the hand that had snatched one of his last precious cigarettes.

  But he didn’t have a choice. The old man grabbed his hand and shook it in both of his, nearly crushing Jake’s fingers in an amazingly powerful grip. “Welcome to Wit’s End—Furniture Factory, Gallery, Studio, Goat Compound, and Creative Academy,” Zedediah Applewhite said.

  When the old man let go, Jake shook his hand to make sure the blood could still get to the tips of his fingers. Then he said a few of his favorite words, just loud enough to be sure they were heard.

  Zedediah Applewhite didn’t so much as blink. “You ought to spend a little time with Cordelia,” he said. “She’s taught my parrot the French for that. Spanish, Italian, and German, too.”

  Chapter Three

  E.D. sat in the kitchen pushing a mini-wheat around in the milk at the bottom of her bowl, trying to let the shaft of early sunlight that fell across the table cheer her up. She wasn’t crazy about mini-wheats, but it was the only kind of cereal left in the house. She’d put her favorite kind on the list, but it was her father’s turn to do the grocery shopping, and he’d forgotten. Again.

  A dry leaf detached itself from the dying wildflower arrangement in the middle of the table and drifted into her bowl. She fished it out. Cordelia had just gone through a flower-arranging phase, and of course her arrangements had been beautiful. She was a true Applewhite, after all, which meant that whatever creative activity she put her mind to, she did it really well. But she’d gotten bored with flower arranging, and now the bouquets were blackening all over the house. By the time anybody did anything with them, there’d be nothing left but dry, empty stems and slimy water. By then even Cordelia probably wouldn’t remember how they’d gotten there. There was a disturbing lack of focus and follow-up in her family.

  E.D. didn’t know how she could have been born an Applewhite. She wasn’t anything at all like the rest of them. Even her mother and Aunt Lucille, who were only Applewhites by marriage, were more like them than she was. Applewhites were enormously talented. She was not. Applewhites thrived on chaos. E.D. wanted organization and sense. Applewhites loved spontaneity. E.D. wanted a schedule and a plan she could count on. Applewhites craved freedom. E.D. wanted structure.

  It was way too early for her to be up, but she’d wakened before dawn from nightmares she couldn’t quite remember, except that Jake Semple had been in them. She hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. This was the day he would be moving in.

  The Applewhites were determined to find the good kid under the bad exterior. It didn’t seem to occur to them that the kid might be bad all the way through. His own grandfather, a man who looked a little shell-shocked, seemed all too eager to get rid of him. Hadn’t anyone noticed that? E.D. spooned the last mini-wheat into her mouth, put the bowl on the floor for Winston, who was sleeping noisily at her feet, and then sat, elbows on the table, chin resting on her fists, staring into the early sunlight.

  Yesterday, after the goats had been rounded up and her four-year-old brother, Destiny, had been found digging for pirate treasure between the circle of carrots and the circle of tomatoes in Lucille’s vegetable garden, there had been a family meeting. Everybody had been there except, of course, her older brother, Hal.

  Hal was not just a typical introverted artist. Sometime in the last year he had become an actual recluse. He didn’t come out of his room except, as far as anyone could tell, in the middle of the night, when he was reasonably certain everyone else would be asleep.

  The point of the family meeting had been to outline The Plan for Jake’s assimilation into the Creative Academy. It was worse than she’d feared. He was going to be in her class.

  This ought to have been an impossibility. The Creative Academy did not have classes. One of the main reasons the Creative Academy had been started in the first place was to avoid what her father called “clumping.” Applewhites, he said, shouldn’t be required to do what other people did just because other people did it—Applewhites weren’t like other people.

  It had all started when Cordelia was in the seventh grade at Traybridge Middle School and was told by a teacher that she wasn’t allowed to paint a zebra black and purple, because zebras were really black and white. The fact that the zebra in question was part of a science report, not an art project, hadn’t made any difference to Randolph Applewhite. “Real science demands creativity and individuality,” he had told the principal when he withdrew his three older kids from the school district the very next day. “Without creativity and individuality, there would be no scientific discovery. No Galileo, no Newton, no Einstein.”

  If her father had been safely off directing a play somewhere when the zebra issue came up, she and Cordelia and even Hal might still be going to school in Traybridge, to a regular school with schedules and organization and a great many normal people. Including Melissa, her best friend, whom she never got to see in person anymore.

  But Randolph hadn’t been off directing. He had been at home with time on his hands. Worse, a theater company that had hired him to direct a play for them had called only that morning, to tell him they had decided not to do that play, so they didn’t need him after all. He had been feeling rejected. Artists were tricky enough to handle when their work was going extremely well. Rejected artists could be downright dangerous.

  Within a week the Creative Academy had been registered with the state department of education and was up and running. It had turned out to be quite easy to start a home school in North Carolina. All that was required was a guarantee that the teachers had high school diplomas. That was no problem. The academy teachers were the Applewhite adults, and all of them except Uncle Archie had finished college. Even Uncle Archie, who had dropped out of high school to travel the world on a tramp steamer, had eventually gotten a G.E.D. so that he could enroll in art school for a while.

  It hadn’t been necessary to file a curriculum with the state, which was a good thing, because the Applewhites didn’t believe in telling the children what to study and when. The Creative Academy wasn’t so much a home school as an unschool. Its students were supposed to follow their own interests and create their own educational plans. Separately. Individually. Creatively. That meant that, except for E.D., nobody had any sort of educational plan at all. And, of course, nobody was ever doing the same thing as anybody else at the same time.

  Until now. Now Jake was to follow E.D.’s plan. She didn’t want him to. She had created her plan just for her. She had thought it up for herself and she wanted to accomplish it by herself. She might not have talent, she might not have a creative bone in her body, but she wasn’t half bad at learning. She had reminded the family about the academy’s philosophy. About individuality. The case against clumping. But she could have saved her breath. She and Jake Semple were to be a class.

  Part of the reason was math. Up till yesterday, she’d liked math.

  Nobody else in the family did. Two and two added up to four no matter who added them, and they went right on adding up to four month after month and year after year. It’s what E.D. had always liked about
it. Everybody else found it boring. If home schooled kids didn’t have to take standardized tests once a year—tests that included math—E.D. felt sure there wouldn’t be any math learned at the academy at all. Since they did have to take those tests, they took math online. E.D. was exactly where Jake Semple’s last report card from the school he’d burned down said he was. Seventh grade. Geometric problem solving. Comparing percentiles and fractions.

  E.D. pulled another dry leaf from the dying bouquet. She had told them that she was willing to be clumped with Jake for math—just not everything else. But it hadn’t done any good. Jake Semple needed to do “cooperative learning” so he could become better socialized, they said, and she was the only genuinely cooperative member of the family. Besides, he wasn’t the sort of person—yet—who could be expected to come up with his own structure and organization. “He needs to begin, at least, with yours,” Zedediah had said. And that had been that.

  E.D. thought of the fat three-ring binder that held her curriculum for the first half of this year. It gave her life order. Stability. Predictability. It had taken her a whole week in August to plan it out. There were sections for each subject, and for each one she had written down her goals and listed every project she planned to do to meet those goals. Then she’d made charts and time lines with squares to check off each step as it was completed. So far, she was right on schedule. If she had to catch Jake Semple up on what she had done in each subject so far, it would throw everything into chaos.

  Winston was awake now, lying with his stubby front paws on each side of the cereal bowl, lapping up milk and leaking foamy saliva on E.D.’s sneakers and his own ears. E.D. sighed. She loathed and despised chaos.

  Chapter Four

  When Jake and his grandfather drove in that morning, Lucille Applewhite, wearing capri pants and a billowy blue-and-green flowered shirt, her hair clamped on top of her head and spilling curls in every direction, hurried from the end cottage to greet them. She stood by the truck and burbled on and on to his grandfather about how glad they were to have Jake joining them and how sure she was that they could provide him with just the environment he needed. Jake climbed down from the truck scowling his most ferocious scowl, but she only smiled. Even his silver-spiked black leather collar and his Vampire Zombies from the Beyond T-shirt with the skull and fangs that dripped bright red blood didn’t faze her. After a while, when she didn’t seem to be running down, his grandfather said he’d better be going, told Jake to behave himself, and drove hurriedly away, spitting gravel and leaving Jake standing next to the duffel bag that held everything he’d brought from Rhode Island with him.

  This grandfather he’d only met a few weeks ago couldn’t wait to be rid of him, Jake thought. The old man was no match for the likes of Jake Semple.

  “Let’s get you settled in your room,” Lucille said. “And then I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Jake picked up his bag, but she didn’t move. She just stood looking at him, her hands on her hips, her head to one side. Jake intensified his scowl. The combination of this particular expression and this T-shirt, even without the spiked leather collar, had totally unnerved the principal at Traybridge Middle School.

  Lucille sighed a long, appreciative sigh. “A radiant light being, that’s what you are. A radiant light being!”

  Jake very nearly dropped his duffel bag. Radiant light being!

  “And don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”

  There were plenty of people who’d be happy to tell him different, he thought. He tried to imagine his social worker back in Rhode Island calling him a radiant light being. She had never called him anything, he thought. Not even his name. Mostly whenever she had to deal with him she just sighed a lot and shook her head. This poet woman must be seriously crazy. The sooner he got out of here, the better.

  She turned and started back toward the end cottage. “You’ll be bunking with Archie and me in our extra bedroom. I hope you won’t mind how small your room is. Think of it as cozy. I really think it’ll be perfect for you. It was my meditation room till we found out you were joining us. I called it my zen cave. We brought in a bed and a dresser, of course, and it’s all been…” Jake had no idea what her next words meant. Fung schwayed, it sounded like. “So the energy flow is excellent. You’ll find it wonderfully centering.”

  The cottage, like all the others spaced out in a semicircle to the left of the big house, was a silvery gray structure backed up against the woods. Its narrow porch was covered with vines, some of them so thick and powerful looking that they seemed to be in the process of pulling it down altogether. “We call this Wisteria Cottage. You can see why. It’s breathtaking in April when the wisteria’s in bloom.”

  Inside she led him into a small living room lined with bookshelves. In the middle of one shelf was a large, framed photo of a man with a round, smiling dark face, black hair, and piercing black eyes. An entire row of small, flickering candles in glass containers surrounded the photo, and a sprig of what looked like goldenrod stood in a narrow vase next to it. “My guru,” she said. “Govindaswami. A genuine old soul. You’re lucky. He’s coming for a visit, so you’re going to get to meet him in person. You’ll love him. Everybody does.”

  Across the room to Jake’s left, forming a divider between the living room and a small kitchen area, was a couch covered with a red-and-orange flowered throw. Where a coffee table might have been, there was a large, dark, highly polished, rounded wooden object that reminded Jake of a short, fat, shiny hippopotamus. He had never seen anything like it before.

  “Ah!” she said as he stopped to stare at the object. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s my favorite of Archie’s coffee tables. We’re going to lose it for a while, though. He has a gallery show coming up next month, and they especially wanted this one to be in it.”

  “Coffee table?”

  “Well, you couldn’t put a cup of coffee on it, of course, but then who would want to? It’s wonderfully soul filling, don’t you think? That’s what all of Archie’s furniture is meant to be.” Lucille went through an arch into a narrow hall with two doors on one side and one on the other. She flung open the second of the two doors and stepped back. “All yours,” she said.

  Jake started into the room and stopped. It wasn’t just very, very small. It was also lavender. Walls, ceiling, even the oval braided rug were all a faintly nauseating shade of lavender. The single window was framed with lavender-and-white striped curtains, and the bed was covered with the same material. There was a strong smell in the room that reminded him suddenly of a great-great-aunt who’d come to visit his mother once. Jake rubbed his nose to keep himself from sneezing.

  Lucille sniffed appreciatively and pointed to a bowl full of what looked like crushed, dead, gray weeds on top of the dresser, which was the only thing other than the twin bed that would fit in the room. “Dried lavender. Isn’t the aroma wonderful? Calming. Centering. Just like the color. After all you’ve been through, this space should help you begin to breathe again. Think of it as your personal refuge.”

  Jake dropped his bag onto the bed. Begin to breathe? Not until he’d opened a window and gotten rid of that stinking bowl of dead weeds!

  The other door on his side of the hall was the bathroom that the three of them would share, she told him, and the room across the hall was her and Archie’s bedroom. “Now! You want to unpack and get yourself settled, or would you like to go over to the house and check out the schoolroom?”

  “Schoolroom,” Jake said, rubbing his nose again.

  The schoolroom was the wing that had been added on to the side of the house to be the office for the old motor lodge, Lucille told him. It looked pretty much like a schoolroom, except that there was no teacher’s desk and no blackboards. There were bookshelves spilling over with books, and there were four school desks, the kind with the top that lifted up and the seat attached. Three of them were piled high with papers and books; the other was empty except for a mug holding pens and pencils. The walls
were covered with cork, to which papers were pinned several layers deep. There were hand-drawn maps, poems, and stories written on lined paper, drawings in crayon or paint or colored markers, and lots and lots of finger paintings full of unidentifiable shapes in intense rainbow colors. A huge chart labeled THE BUTTERFLY PROJECT hung at the front of the room. Photographs of butterflies were taped to it, and next to each photograph was a printed paragraph.

  All the way across one wall was a banner that read EDUCATION IS AN ADVENTUROUS QUEST FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE, INVOLVING AN ABILITY TO THINK THINGS THROUGH.—Z. APPLEWHITE. Jake didn’t think anyone in any school he’d ever been to would have agreed with that definition.

  Here and there around the room were vases full of dying wildflowers. Along one wall an old door, complete with doorknob, lay across two bright red filing cabinets to form a long desk. On it, almost lost in a litter of notebooks, file folders, computer disks, CDs, and bits of scribbled-on paper, were a computer, printer, and scanner. “Hal has his own computer in his room, so you’ll only have to share this with the other three. E.D. made a sign-up sheet for computer time,” Lucille said. “It’s around here somewhere.”

  The sound of a chain saw started up outside. “That’ll be Archie. He’s a lark—early to bed, early to rise.” Lucille checked her watch. “Oh, dear. Randolph is bound to yell. He’s an owl, you know. Hates to wake up before ten.”

  Lucille began clearing things off one of the desks now. “This will be yours. Hal never uses it anyway! I’ll see what supplies I can find for you. E.D. will tell you later what she’s working on. You and she will be a class.”

  Jake sighed. If he had to be paired with someone for however long he was going to be here, he’d rather it was Cordelia.

  Hammering began somewhere above, followed shortly by heavy pounding that sounded like fists on a door. A voice roared down, “Stop that infernal noise! First Archie, now you. Is everybody mad around here? It’s the cracking of the dawn!” A child’s voice began singing “Pop Goes the Weasel,” loudly and slightly off-key.